Repositories, archive, sources, components, categories...

[Matthew East]

Hi Sebastian,

On Sun, 2006-05-28 at 17:01 +0200, Sebastian Heinlein - glatzor wrote:
> Am Sonntag, den 28.05.2006, 14:35 +0100 schrieb Matthew East:
> > On Sun, 2006-05-28 at 21:31 +0800, Jerome Gotangco wrote:
> > > Well in all honesty, we (me, mvo, glatzor) did discuss it before in
> > > the desktop channel but was only limited for g-a-i itself, but yes,
> > > this should have been distributed all throughout (apologiies).
> > > 
> > > Not to mention stuff like this is a shoo-in for the styleguide.
> > 
> > Well, I think that if a decision has really been taken to change the
> > vocabulary used for something like this, it should have been decided by
> > the technical board and implemented throught the distribution. Having
> > one word for the g-a-i tools and one word for the rest of the world is
> > really not helpful.
> 
> I wrote to the devel list about this issue some monthes ago. Nobody
> replied. So what should I have done? I also nagged many people on IRC.
> 
> https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2006-March/016358.html
> 
> I used the strings of the specs that I found on the wiki. See above. I
> could not know that the spec used strings that were not approved.

It looks to me like you did absolutely everything you should have. It is
a shame that no one replied to your message.

However, I have to say that the use of different vocabulary in various
parts of the distribution (the UI isn't even consistent within itself -
Synaptic uses "Repositories") can only be a bad idea.

To give an extreme and very unlikely example: imagine if Epiphany
suddenly changed all the instances of "internet" in their UI to
"hyperweb". That would obviously be quite confusing, because the
generally accepted standard word is "internet", and all the other
related applications use it.

Now it's an extreme example because the word "internet" is obviously
_really_ standard, and it's a _really_ common word and there are loads
of applications that use it.

However it's the same principle: "repository" is the standard vocabulary
used and understood by Debian and Ubuntu users, both the Debian and
Ubuntu websites use it. Changing this in some applications and not
others is going to create confusion. It should be changed in all of
them, if at all, I think.

(For what it's worth, my opinion is that "repository" is a much more
readily understand term than "channel", that is why it was adopted in
the first place, I'd say).

Matt
-- 
mdke at ubuntu.com
gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF
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